NOTE: I'm embarrassed for not mentioning this sooner, but Miss Kristin Tillotson of the Minnesota Star Tribune wrote a piece on April 26th that quoted my "Slender Man" analysis from last year, and you can read it
HERE. My single "Slender Man" article accounts for nearly three-fourths of all the hits this blog receives, so I hope a little bit of that carries over to Miss Tillotson's article.
Recently, I've been linked to three interesting horror short films distributed online. Despite their large differences, all three caught my eye and kept me watching to the end. In descending order of preference:
Honestly, a zombie musical action comedy romance was inevitable, and "Rigamortis: A Zombie Love Story" starts out predictably, as rock opera based on easy rhymes. A thin music mix (where's the bass?) and amateurish extras don't hep matters. However, the film builds as the story develops. The romance between the two zombie leads (Maxwell Glick and Lisa Musser) convinces, especially since they switch from traditional groans and roars into...well, what I guess zombies must hear when they groan and roar at each other. Additionally, Boston Stergis proves a charismatic and fun antagonist as legendary zombie-killer Brock; a song of his necro-cidal deeds evokes both Disney classic "Gaston" and, God help me, the infamous Chuck-Norris-facts meme, but Stergis sells the material with conviction. Despite its independent production, the film looks great, with ample shadow and effective zombie makeup, although gorehounds may be disappointed by the emphasis on tragic duets over organ splatter. Still, with the trio of lead actors and the technical skill on display, "Rigamortis" has plenty of life.
All of us know H. R. Giger, right?
Alien and
Species creature design? "Technorganic" imagery? Made a microphone stand for rock band Korn? His iconic art gets a boost of energy from Petr Luksan, who separates Giger's legendary gallery of landscapes and beasts into planes of action and carefully animates them, making sure the emphasis is on giving them dimensional reality and a hint of life. There's no effort here to tell a story or place the elements outside their paintings. Luksan simply adds a layer of aesthetic plausibility to Giger's work, and the result is damned eerie. Given the half-hour length of the video, it may have been better to divide this experiment into parts, and Luksan subdivides his into chapter that focus on different subjects like "New York City" and "Victory." Better to dip in and out of this extended atmospheric than watch it beginning to end.
PS: As the acronym above points out, many images in this short are profoundly not safe for work; they may not be safe for anyone. That's the point. You're supposed to feel violated.
RATING: B
io9.com offered this short as a morsel to the starving fans left unfulfilled by Guillermo Del Toro's attempted Lovecraft smorgasbord,
At the Mountains of Madness. While the end result feels underwhelming, there are some moments in this short that achieve the
frisson Lovecraft attempted with his novella about an ancient Arctic city. Particularly, the glimpses of the nameless city, with all of its bizarre architecture, conjure up Lovecraftian descriptors like "eldritch" and "cyclopean." Few other adjectives would suffice. However, Botticelli combines 3-D computer animation with 2-D hand-drawn characters, and the 2-D characters, frankly, look like crap. In addition to their poorly-drawn quality, the shot framing goes to great pains to avoid fingers and feet, which feels less like a creative decision and more like a way to skimp on animation hours. Still, Lovecraft die-hards will find elements to admire. My favorite bit was the ending that deftly ties together Lovecraft's entire cosmology. Botticelli's previous short, "
A Lovecraft Dream," is both prettier and more efficient.
RATING: C
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